Ugly: Giving us back our beauty standards

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Why did I still feel like this? Something I hadn’t yet identified was keeping me lodged in this web of self-hatred. I was angry at myself, too – I was well versed in how the capitalist patriarchal agenda has used beauty standards against women as a means of controlling us. Logically, I knew I now had permission to embrace my looks, but ugly was so deeply ingrained in me, it wouldn’t let me go. More than anything else I wanted to be free of its clutches, but there was a missing piece to this exhausting puzzle. That’s why it’s become a fascinating subject to me, simply because I’ve never had it – I’ve always felt on the outside of pretty, looking in. She argues that a “more subversive and effective way to expose the construct of womanhood” would be to “reject the tools of construction, such as cosmetic surgery, entirely. As it is, Madonna is propping up the very systems she claims to be standing up to—ageism, misogyny—by refusing to let her aging female body age visibly.” Exactly, and the vicious circle has to be broken because it just causes so much misery and we're not living our lives to the full extent that we should be. I can definitely say that of my own experience and I know that's the case for lots of other people, too.

Who profits? Keeping women feeling small, old, unworthy and ugly supports patriarchy and capitalism. People get rich when women buy stuff they don’t need via the creation of beauty anxiety. My mum has never mentioned ageing to me. She’s never bemoaned her age, the emergence of grey hairs, skin or body changes. She doesn’t care about anti-ageing creams or treatments. None of my relatives have either, even those closer to my age. Ageing woes just don’t exist for them, and yet, for me, it’s been an unwelcome foe since my late teens, waiting for its opportunity to strike. The reason for this disparity, I think, could be a cultural issue. Because the only difference between my mum, my relatives, and me is that they grew up in India and I grew up in the UK.

“People are upset by Madonna’s new face because it is, on some level, exposing the truth: that antiaging is an inhuman goal, and attempting to antiage—or age gracefully—actually takes an incredible amount of effort.”

Unfortunately, when beauty standards begin to change, the different systems of oppression that control them work harder and they just become more insidious. That's why we need to be able to police them and take ourselves away from things that might be causing us harm. Being a child, I didn’t have the words to identify the feeling but, decades later, I can still feel its searing intensity. I now recognise it as shame; it was the first moment that I felt “different” from those around me, in a way that I could identify as negative. A seed of anguish was planted. From that moment on, every time a classmate said my frizzy hair was horrible or my arms were hairy, or I was told by a playmate that her mum said she couldn’t play with me any more because I was brown, my feeling of otherness grew. As did my sense of ugliness. I’ll add 10 women my age or older who embrace their age to my social media feed and remove anyone I compare myself negatively with. I then made a pivotal life choice. Where is the worst place you can imagine a broken human obsessed with being thin and beautiful and never quite measuring up might find themselves? You guessed it: women’s fashion magazines. I developed some self-preservation tactics in an effort to counteract the wrongness of the beauty standards I’d been sold my entire life. Now, I employ slow beauty, using products until they’re finished and buying them because I love the smells, design and textures, so it’s more of a pleasurable, sensory experience rather than panic-buying something I’ve been sold as a “jar of hope.” It makes a big difference to your mindset when you switch to using beauty products for joy, rather than using them to look prettier, thinner, younger.

I remember when I started in the fashion and journalism industry, I felt that pretty much everyone was white. I wish I could tell myself then that the things I thought were working against me were probably going to make my career in what was a very elitist industry. I wish I could tell myself that the difference I felt is a great thing because it gives me a very unique perspective.

“Women are expected to perform the labor of applying cosmetics and then the labor of making those cosmetics seem nonexistent.”

Every brush stroke became a silent prayer for me to look like the girls around me who were held up as the beauty ideal. Those girls all looked largely the same: white, thin and pretty, everything I was shown I wasn’t. Think Joey Potter in Dawson’s Creek, Marissa Cooper in The OC or Rory Gilmore in Gilmore Girls, and their wholesome, effortless good looks. I genuinely believed that people were staring at me because I was so deeply unappealing and odd-looking. I’ll make a moodboard of beauty and fashion looks I want to try just because I love them and they represent me. And I’ll try one new thing every week.

I wouldn't say I stopped hating the way I look but this book helped me make a significant steps towards just accepting myself the way that I am. One of my favourite games as a child growing up in Wales was directing doll photo shoots, an odd premonition into my future career directing beauty editorials for magazines. The star of my glamorous imaginary shoots was Barbie, naturally. She kind of lost me with the yoga bit. I understand her frustration with the cultural appropriation aspect but yoga without the spiritual aspect has a place - especially for us atheists who could benefit from the physical movement aspects of the practice. Perhaps not calling it yoga, as such would be more appropriate. Speaking to Glamour about why youth is celebrated above all else in women, Bhagwandas notes, “We have a society with a strong patriarchal legacy that has dictated that you can only be beautiful and valuable within very narrow parameters, one of which is being young and fertile. ” “It's about aging with some cosmetic intervention to still be agreeable to the male gaze, but not too much that you seem desperate, or that it’s noticeable.” Who isn’t feeling like this? Men – largely speaking. They don’t have the pressure to look under 30 all their lives. Often they’re told they look better with age.

“It's about aging with some cosmetic intervention to still be agreeable to the male gaze, but not too much that you seem desperate, or that it’s noticeable.”

Anita felt the world was telling her to ‘correct’ the colour of her skin as she got older (Photo: Supplied) Once you know that there are mechanisms like that... and that there are elements actively still defining what we see as beautiful now, it's really powerful. Then, you're able to make the choice as to whether you agree with it or not." To say that navigating “ugly” shaped my life is an understatement. It affected everything, including my career trajectory, which eventually led to me becoming a beauty editor. I had put myself into the very world that I had felt so alienated from. Why? I hoped that being around so much of it would finally rub off on me. Instead, I felt uglier than ever.